Auditing your personal

information management
An action guide for the perplexed or merely curious

Mark Gregory
Teacher and Open
University Ph.D.
student
ESC Rennes School of
Business

1
 An Healthy Uneasiness I
 Didyou ever feel …
 How many times have you felt …

 When was the last time you felt …

… that you did not have the right

means to store, organise and retrieve
your personal data?

2
 An Healthy Uneasiness II
 Do you have an effective system of folders and
sub-folders on your computers?
• Could you change it to make it better? How?
 Do you use more than one computer and/or
"platform" (e.g. Windows PC; Mac; smartphone)?
• How do you synchronise them?
• How do you protect them?
 What happens to you when (not if!) you lose your
smartphone? your hard disk contents?

3
 Good news…
 You are not alone!
 In fact, you are a knowledge worker
• (Drucker 2000)
 You work in knowledge networks as
part of (real or virtual) teams
 (Toffler 1990) observed that knowledge
workers must have at their disposal systems
to create, process and enhance their
knowledge and that of their subordinates

4
What is Personal
Information Management?
 Knowledge and information workers work as individuals
within team structures to get work done
 Computer-based tools can assist in the storage and
management of the information they acquire
 However, little is understood about
• How people use these tools
• How they learn new ones
• The ways in which the tools constrain the ways in which
people work and think
• How best to educate people to make the right choice of the
right tools
 Lots of tools (e.g. spreadsheets) – few people use them
well!
5
Research context:
a Ph.D. in progress
 TOPIC: “Towards a better understanding of how
individuals and small groups use computer-
based information and knowledge
representation tools”
 OPEN UNIVERSITY SUPERVISOR: Prof. David
Weir, Liverpool Hope University
 INTERNAL (ESC Rennes) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Dirk
Schneckenberg
 With special thanks to Dr. Mario Norbis, Quinnipiac
University, Massachusetts, who has often guided
me!

6
My Aim and Yours
 Part of my aim is to help you to become more
efficient and effective by managing your
personal information better
 As you do this, I want you to consider telling us
what works for you and why
• So that I can improve my understanding of what
works and why on the basis of your experiences and
those of others
• 1 + 1 = 3, win-win…
• You are invited to participate in my Action Research!
 Before you can do this, here’s some
background…

7
Structure of this presentation
 What PIM is
 Productivity paradoxes
 How to “do” PIM using your office suite
 How to “do” PIM using specialist PIM programs
 Researching PIM: my overall agenda
 Auditing your personal information
management: a suggested agenda for you
 Parenthesis on advanced classification -
ontology
 Challenges
8
“Err… Put it more simply, please…”
 Q:
• What is personal information management?
 A1:
• Storing the information you need to Get Things Done GTD
• Examples: diary (agenda), to-do list
 A2:
• Keeping information in a way in which you can find it again
and evolve it – Keeping Found Things Found KFTF
• Keeping it up-to-date
• Restructuring it when that’s necessary
• Example: your Contacts / Address Book

9
 Sample PIM (Ecco): Contacts +
To-Do + Appointments

Contacts /
address list
Folder hierarchy
– itself an outline
Appointment with
Details of highlighted person
highlighted person 10
 Working better
 We are motivated by or paid for what we do,
what we achieve: for our work
 Doing things involves processes, resources,
information and knowledge
 Doing bigger things in accordance with
deadlines and budgets may require projects
 Work is usually done in a competitive context –
where we as individuals or as part of an
organisation have to do and be better than
others
 Increasingly it is done collaboratively
11
The role of information management
in work
 Knowledge and information workers work as
individuals within organisational departments
• But departments are a relatively (and increasingly?)
unimportant organisational convenience
 More significant are work processes
• Work processes require information which the worker stores
in a large number of arbitrarily complex ways
• Some are paper-based
• But they’re increasingly computer-based
• And they’re moving to the Web
• Processes are sometimes individual but very often involve
collaboration, implying shared information
 Some of the time we work in virtual team structures to
do one-off particular tasks
• This way of working is called project work
12
 Processes and Projects
 Aims, objectives, goals… are achieved by processes and/or
projects
 Business process (or method)
• A collection of related, structured activities or tasks that
produce a specific service or product for customers (external
or internal)
 Business project
• A collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or
design, that is carefully planned and executed to achieve a
particular aim
 Processes are repeated and ongoing
 Projects come into existence to address a specific problem
or issue and then come to an end
• Social networking within and outside the enterprise is blurring the
distinction between process and project, which is still useful
13
Managing projects - 1
A project can be defined as
• A temporary endeavour undertaken to create a
unique product, service or result
• A management environment that is created for
the purpose of delivering one or more business
products according to a specified business
case
 Theproject objectives define target
status at the end of the project

14
Managing projects - 2
 A project therefore needs
• Objectives
• Plan
• Execution
• Evaluation
• The evaluation (measurement) occurs at the project closure but also
by continuously monitoring and evaluating during the execution of
the project
 Projects may be huge (build the Channel Tunnel) or they
may be small (build an en-suite bathroom)
 Smaller projects:
• Don’t generally need complicated software like Microsoft Project
• But they do need managing – there may be sub-contractors (e.g. your
partner!) and there are dependencies between tasks

15
The challenge of organisational
productivity
 (Strassmann 1999) identified an organisational
productivity paradox
• Increasing technological possibilities raise the hurdles
all the time
• Although you can do some things quicker…
• Overall you don’t get much more work done!
 Why? Organisations have to do things better in order
to compete with others who are reacting to and
benefiting from the same new possibilities

16
Knowledge work
 (Drucker 2000) identified better knowledge
work productivity as our most important
economic need
• He went so far as to warn that our long term prosperity
and even our economic survival depends upon it
 Knowledge work productivity is the measure
of the efficiency and effectiveness of the
output generated by workers who mainly rely
on knowledge, rather than labour, during the
production process

17
The challenge of personal and
small-group productivity
 Individual knowledge workers face a personal productivity
paradox of the same kind as do organisations
• Increasing technological possibilities raise the hurdles all the
time
• Although you can do some things quicker…
• Overall you don’t get much more work done!
 Why?
• Individuals and the teams of which they form a part have to do
things better in order to compete with others who are reacting to
and benefiting from the same new possibilities
• We vary considerably in our efficiency and effectiveness, as
individuals and as collaborators
• Most of us are not lazy – we just concentrate on the wrong
things at the wrong time!
 We have to improve, OK?

18
Auditing our processes, projects
and information needs
 We should audit the way we work and the
way we manage our information in order
continuously to improve them
• Better identification and understanding of
the various processes of which we are a part
• Better managed projects
• Based (in part) on better information
management

19
Two Key Productivity Issues
 Individuals, teams and organisations need to carry
out business processes; they have to Get Things
Done: GTD
• (Allen 2003)
 To do this, they need to Keep Found Things
Found: KFTF
• Data
• Information
• Knowledge
• (Jones 2007)
20
What is the difference between Getting
Things Done (GTD) and Keeping Found
Things Found (KFTF) - 1?
 GTD is about planning your work and doing it,
as an individual and in the various teams of
which you are part
 For example, teamwork for students:
• Teams for coursework assignments
• Work or project teams when doing internships
• Student clubs and micro-enterprises
• In fact, whatever is done in small groups
• It includes things like diaries (agendas, personal and
shared) and project plans
21
What is the difference between Getting
Things Done (GTD) and Keeping Found
Things Found (KFTF) – 2?
 KFTF is about keeping all the information you
need to learn, to work, to live; things like:
• Lecture notes
• Reading lists
• Contact lists (address book)
• Shopping lists
• Recipes for meals
 Note that some things, e.g. “When your team is
playing football”, can be in either the GTD category
or the KFTF category or both

22
KFTF: Keeping Found Things Found
 Searching is not always the best way to find things – if
you have already found them and kept them organised
 So we make lists (and lists of lists), such as:
• Shopping lists
• Websites, perhaps using Google toolbar to store bookmarks
on the Web
• Bibliographic references
 This is an example of Keeping Found Things Found – the
fundamental need is to be able to find and store
information for reuse
 Further reading: Jones, William (2007)

23
A business school teacher-
researcher as an example
knowledge worker (Drucker
2000)
 Aim: to learn and to assist others to learn
 Processes
• Assimilate existing knowledge
• Create new knowledge
• Publish scientific papers

• Disseminate knowledge
• Create new teaching materials
• Edit and integrate existing teaching materials

• Represent knowledge: describe and model an applicable state of the art

• Assess learning
• Design modules and programmes
• Research existing management
• Manage research and learning
 Data, information, knowledge
• As needed by each of these processes
Managing knowledge - an
example context: Schools - 1
 Schools are institutions of learning
 Outputs
• Better educated students
• Scholarly production
• Improved professional practice
 Actors
• Candidate students who wish to be better educated
• Firms that need workers
• Practitioners who want to be more efficient and / or effective
• Us: teachers, researchers
• Standards bodies: accreditors, professional institutions…
Managing knowledge - an
example context: Schools - 2
 Processes
• Pedagogy
• Disseminating / sharing useful and usable knowledge
• Teaching, learning and assessment (TLA)
• Research
• Creating (hopefully) useful and usable knowledge
• These are forms of Knowledge Management,
personal and group
 Tools
• Libraries, ICT, the Web; software and systems
Classifying and tagging things
 Hierarchical classification schemes: giving
names to parts of lists
• You can use simple keyword classification schemes, or
more complicated classification schemes such as those
used by libraries
 Recently, social networking sites have introduced
tagging. Such sites include:
• Reddit
• Digg
• Del.ici.ous
 Semantic network services may well be the next
generation:
• E.g. Radar Networks Twine
27
Example concept map (extract)
Process Understand
STUDY PKM: PKM: personal
think about and S knowledge
observe PKM management
GTD: get
things done

S KFTF: keep
Knowledge S found things
worker C found
C
C
PRACTISE PKM: do
C PKM C Use PKM
tools Share
C C
information
and
C A
C knowledge
IP

Specific
Researcher S
instance of Do Ph.D in PKM Concept PKM / PIM
Process tools

A A IP

P Use PKM tools to

do the PhD
Learn from P
doing the PhD

(Paquette 2002)
 Example concept map with forward
and feedback loops highlighted
Understand
STUDY PKM: PKM: personal
think about and S knowledge
observe PKM management
GTD: get
things done

S KFTF: keep
Knowledge S found things
worker C found
C
C
PRACTISE PKM: do
C PKM C Use PKM
tools Share
C C
information
and
C A
C knowledge
IP

Researcher S
Do Ph.D in PKM
PKM / PIM
tools

A A IP

P Use PKM tools to

do the PhD Source:
P
Learn from
doing the PhD
author
A complementary perspective:
memory and cognitive processing

Short term memory

Process:
think
Long term memory

Source:
author
Individual knowledge worker
 Source:
author

The individual shares

knowledge in a team
or community of
practice

The individual extends her knowledge management using PC

and web-based PIM and PKM tools
Classification versus tagging
 Classification decides where things are in a strict tree-
structured hierarchy
• Advantage: it’s easy to find something because it can only
be in one place (or, of course, nowhere)
• Disadvantages:
• Complicated, especially when more than one person classifies
• Not realistic in every context – Fred is both a professional
footballer and a town councillor
 Tagging permits the same thing to be found via different
routes
• But it risks being anarchic!
 Ergo, both are needed, depending on context

32
Computers and productivity
 Computers can be used to:
• Store and manage information
• Represent and help to manage knowledge
 Computers can be used to improve efficiency
• This was the original justification for introducing computers
into businesses from the 1950s onwards
 Computers can be used to increase effectiveness
 “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently
that which should not be done at all.”
• Peter F. Drucker

33
Research question and how
to investigate it
 Q: How do knowledge workers manage their personal
information and knowledge and how can they be
helped to improve their personal knowledge
management (PKM) by a teaching, learning and
evaluation framework?
 One approach: provide people with self-help tools to
evaluate and improve their own PIM / PKM and
observe how much more effective they become
 Another approach: actively intervene with people to
assess their learning styles, existing knowledge and
to help them learn to improve
Business information systems - 1
 Most organisations identify and procure
computer-based information systems
 “Information systems are the means
by which people and organisations,
utilising technologies, gather,
process, store, use and disseminate
information” (UK Academy for
Information Systems definition)

35
Business information systems - 2
 These systems generally support the main ongoing
processes of the organisation
 Example: in a school or university
• A student resource planning system supports the
assessment process
• A learning management system (LMS) or virtual
learning environment (VLE) supports the teaching and
learning process
 These are examples of large, corporate information
systems which form part of the overall applications
portfolio of an organisation

36
Work Systems
 (Alter 2002) defined a Work System
as:
 A system in which people and/or
machines perform a business process
using resources (e.g., information,
technology, raw materials) to create
products/services for internal or
external customers

37
Information Systems
 Information System = a work system that
processes information, thereby supporting
other work systems
 An Information System processes data:
• Capture (input) the data
• Transmit
• Store
• Retrieve
• Manipulate – calculate, collate …
• Display

38
 Business Information System
Data Information
Source Data Processing System Client

Store Retrieve
Data Data

Databas
e

39
How individuals store data - 1

 Data is typically stored in files

• E.g. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets
 But sometimes in databases
• E.g. Access databases
 Word, Excel and Access are programs
included in the Microsoft Office suite
that enable users to create, update and
delete data

40
 Office productivity suites
 An office suite is a software suite
(collection of component programs)
intended for use by people like clerical staff
and knowledge workers
 The components are generally distributed
together, have a consistent user interface
and usually can interact with each other
• Best-known current examples of office suites are
Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org
41
What do they do?
Office suite functionality
 Focus on the production of documents of various kinds
 Also offer various tools for managing and sharing
personal information; the facilities typically include:

• Word processor • Database

• Spreadsheet • Graphics suite
• Presentation • Messaging and email client
program
 Many people use general office applications such as
spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel) and relational
databases (e.g. Microsoft Access) specifically for
personal and small-group information
management
42
How individuals store data - 2
 Data is typically stored in tables:
two-dimensional structures
• In MS Office terms:
• Word tables (also PowerPoint)
• Excel worksheets
• Access tables
 Tables can be linked, adding a third dimension
• In MS Office terms:
• Excel worksheets
• These can cross-refer to each other, using functions like
HLOOKUP, MATCH and EQUIV
• Access tables are related using primary and foreign keys

43
 Storing data in Microsoft Office
Method Advantages Disadvantages

Word Simple, well understood by people No formulae (or only very

with weak computing skills rudimentary ones)

  Excellent formatting options Not a safe place to store critical or

long-life data
  Powerful built-in outliner for
structuring lists (e.g. of tasks)
Excel Some degree of structure – rows Poor support for queries – searching
and columns is slow and finding information again
is imprecise
  Very powerful data manipulation Size limits – 65535 rows (until Office
using formulae 2007)
    No design methodology or
coherence
    Not a safe place to store critical or
long-life data
Access Relational data model gives More difficult to learn
method and coherence
  Very powerful data structuring Requires thoughtful use and
and querying advance planning
  Note: Safer
this slide is aortwo-dimensional
critical long-life data PowerPoint
Not as safetable
as MS SQL Server, etc.
Outlining in Word – Table of Contents

Note that Outlining

forces a strict tree-
structured hierarchy
– a piece of text is
classified by where it
is in the document

Use Outline Mode (in French: “mode plan”) 45

Using Excel for bibliographic referencing

Formulae are used

to link data; these
formulae can include
user-programmed
elements (here,
exists_file)

46
 Using Access to store details of
paper documents – Tables and
Relationships

Note that here Docs

are hierarchically
classified by subject Note that here Docs
– SubCategory within are hierarchically
Category within classified by storage
Context – Location within Unit

47
Using Access to store details of paper
documents –
typical Form / Subform / Sub-subform

48
Mindmaps – for those who prefer
visual representation

49
Group Information Management
 People work in teams, often virtual – see (Lurey &
Raisinghani 2001)
 Shared agendas – meeting scheduling
• E.g. use a Google shared Calendar
 Collaborative development of documents
• Advanced versions of MS Office offer many facilities to enable this
 Shared classification schemes
• Keywords
• Which may be hierarchical
• Tagging and wikitags

50
Special software for personal and small-
group information management
 There are also a number of computer-based
tools, sometimes referred to as Personal
Information Managers or PIMs which are
intended particularly to assist in the storage
and management of personal information,
tasks and projects
 PIMs are additional and complementary to
the functionality of the so-called “office
suites” (sometimes “office productivity
suites”)
 You may need both!

51
Why can’t I manage my work
using Outlook, Excel, Access?
 You can, to a large degree; but:
• Outlook rigidly distinguishes messages from tasks
from contacts and doesn’t greatly help you to organise
or link them
• What you have to do is partly in a task list, largely in
your email in-tray!
• Using Excel or Access requires you to structure your
information very carefully – and most of us will spend
more time doing that than we can save!
• Not everyone is good at Do-It-Yourself!

52
Ready-made PIM or Do-It-
Yourself?
 Need a new information system? Bespoke (custom-built)?
Packaged? Integrated-component system building?
 An analogy:
You need a new kitchen - What alternatives exist?
• Bespoke (custom-built)?
Get A Man In (GAMI)!
• Totally customised
• Expensive
• Depends on a partnership between client and supplier and on accurate
transmission of requirements
• And then the client changes their mind…
• Packaged?
Buy a kit - IKEA
• Integrated-component system building
Do It Yourself (DIY) – Home Depot, Brico Dépôt, Mr. Bricolage
 Put more simply, Make or Buy?

53
Problems
associated with approaches based on
using particular programs in a suite

 An analogy:
• A carpenter who only uses hammers and
nails tackles badly, or not at all, problems
which need screws and screwdrivers!
 Similarly:

• Someone who uses spreadsheets to do what

should be done with a database!
 Having a good toolbox doesn’t make you
a good carpenter…

54
Recap: we MUST manage our
information better…
 Some information belongs to organisations and
has to be managed by them: they procure
corporate business information systems
 Employers also enable individual productivity by
providing PCs together with an office suite
 However we all store and manage information
(and knowledge) which is personal to us and
represents our own competitive advantage –
it’s ours, to manage and to profit from
• Implies our own PC + office suite + PIM:
personal information management

55
Ways of managing your personal
information
 Write your own PIM program?
• Not a sensible option! Life’s too short…
 Build your own customised approach
• By integrating parts of an office suite, e.g. using Outlook
together with Excel or Access – fine for individuals, OK for
small groups
• But if you and your collaborators need a shared, web-
accessible, database, note the arrival of “Situational
Applications” – briefly discussed later in this presentation
 Select and procure one or more ready-made PIM
program(s)
 In practice: some combination is common

56
Using office tools for personal
information management
 Email, contact and event management
software (e.g. Microsoft Outlook)
• Many people manage what they have to do by
leaving uncompleted work as emails in their in-
box
 Hierarchical outliners (e.g. Microsoft Word /
PowerPoint outlines)
 Mind-mapping software (e.g. MindManager)

57
PIM and PIM programs
 Specific computer-based tools (sometimes
referred to as Personal Information Managers
or PIMs) have been created in order to assist in
the storage and management of personal
information
 Programs:
• E.g. Ecco, EssentialPIM, InfoQube
 Web services:
• E.g. Basecamp
58
Getting smarter: Auditing
your current approach to PIM

 Why not set yourself the task of improving

your personal information management?
 You can ask for help from a friendly
neighbourhood PIM specialist…
• E.g. the author of this presentation!
 Or you can help yourself by carrying out a
Self-Audit
• And here are some suggested first steps…

59
Think about the personal
information management style
that suits you
Think about, describe, analyse and then write
notes on:
 How you Get Things Done (GTD)
• That is, how you keep details of what you need to do
and when, and how you plan and organise your time
 How you Keep Found Things Found (KFTF)
• That is, what you do to store and manage all the
personal information you need in order to learn well
and to live well
• How should you classify things in order to be able to
find them again? On paper? On your computer and
other devices (phone, music)?

60
First necessity:
Use folders and sub-folders

 To group like, related, things together

• Hierarchical classification
 Organise your computer-based files better
• Use Windows Explorer
• Not the same thing as Internet Explorer
• Or Apple Finder etc.

61
 Think about group tasks
 Describe and analyse how you (plural) Get Things Done, that
is, how you keep details of what your various workgroups need
to do and when, and how you plan and organise your time in that
group
• How might you use computer software (such as the programs you use
as an individual, or others) in order to improve this management of
time? Can you get group “buy-in” (commitment) to your suggested
approach?
 Describe and analyse how you Keep Found Things Found,
that is, what you do to store and manage all the information you
need to work together effectively in groups
• How might you use computer software (such as the programs you use
as an individual, or others) in order to improve this management of
information?

62
Questions to ask yourself about
personal information management
- 1
 What “platforms” (computers and mobile phones) do
you currently use in your work and personal lives?
 List the computer programs you use for personal and
work-related purposes
 List the web services you use for personal and work-
related purposes
• Have you ever considered alternatives? Which?
 How do you keep a list of favourite web sites? Do
you use bookmarks in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari
etc.? Do you keep an online list of favourites (e.g.
Google Toolbar bookmarks)? Should you?

63
Questions to ask yourself about
personal information management -
2
 List the ways in which you store and manage
personal information at the moment
• How do you keep your agenda (electronic diary) (if any)? How
often do you lose it?
• Which email clients do you use? Do you synchronise them?
 What personal information matters to you?
Make a list of the various kinds (or types) of
information you store, and how you currently do
it
• Examples include shopping lists, inventory of possessions, bank
account details, references of books and articles you want to
read…
 List the processes you carry out to maintain and
use this personal information
64
Do you participate in projects?
 Projects involve:
• Multiple participants
• A single-participant project can be treated as a simple project
• Tasks which depend on other tasks
• Tasks which break down into sub-tasks
 Projects need to be planned and managed
• Project manager
• Usually, a project supervision arrangement, such as a project steering
committee
 Tasks in themselves have characteristics (properties,
attributes) which are very similar to processes, and they can
be treated as a subset of processes
• Both tasks and processes may need to be analysed and even modelled, if
they are complicated

65
Kinds of data: What data do you
keep?
 These are some of the kinds of documents and
data that people keep:
• Contact management, address books, etc.
• Diary: Calendar and meeting scheduling
• To Dos: task management for self and others
• Errands to run, films to see...

• Journal: a record of the use of your time

• Document creation and management
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
• Message management
• Emails, instant messages, etc.
66
Rôle-specific information
 There is an overlap between personal information
and shared small-group
 There is also an overlap between
• Generic information – the information that almost anyone
might keep
• Agenda, contacts, etc.
• Rôle-specific information
• For a lecturer / professor: references / bibliographic details,
shared agenda, student results etc.
 Why? Different groups of knowledge workers (Drucker
2000) keep different kinds of personal information

67
 Processes associated with
personal information: What
processes? - 1
Among the processes associated with personal information are these; which matter
to you? Describe them, in some detail. The items in bold italics are further
described on the next slide.
 Capture
 Store
 Secure
 Communicate / synchronise between devices and platforms
 Finding things again
• Classify
• Find
 Show
 Present
 Share
 Reuse
 Publish
 Reorganise
68
 A bit more detail on such
processes
 Capture: of text, pictures, audio, video, web clippings…
 Store for easy access
• Handheld, on PC, stored on the Web (“in the cloud”)
 Secure storage
• Keeping secrets – showing to some (but not others)
• Preserving investment
• Potentially across decades
 Finding things again
• Classifying them when found or created/modified
• Searching for them later
• Filtering your lists to show only relevant items
 Presentation
• Visual aspects: getting a message across
• Communication and Sharing (read-only, or shared-update)
 Reuse: using material again: in a new presentation, book…

69
 Processes associated with
personal information: What
processes? - 2
At a more detailed level, do you need:
 Journalising or Diarising: record “anything and everything”
• Personal notes/journal, annotations and note-taking in multiple media: a kind of
electronic jotter
 Transcription between media, e.g. handwriting recognition, voice
recognition, scanning and OCR
 Search across email, e-docs and other information forms, across multiple
media types
 Hypertext Authoring: writing documents that make links between each other
 Synchronisation between computers: Mobile/PDA devices and inter-
device synchronisation
 Coordination between people in hierarchies and in projects
 Visualisation of information resources
• Graphing, charting, mind maps etc.
 Export, e.g. to PowerPoint

70
Now get real…
 What are the really big frustrations in your personal information
management?
• Do you forget where you’ve put things on your computer? How do you find
them again?
• Do you have difficulty keeping and synchronising files between computers?
• Do you find it difficult to manage documents that you store locally on your PC and the
same or similar documents stored on work file servers, web services, etc.?
• Do you end up with multiple, incompatible versions of more-or-less the same
information?
• Do you succeed or fail in coordinating / synchronising address books, diary, etc.
between computers?
• Do you succeed or fail in managing multiple email services (e.g. work/school,
home Hotmail, home Gmail…)?
• How do you coordinate your activities when you work in groups / virtual teams?
 What are you going to do to improve the situation?

71
Understand your style of
work: How do you work best?
- 1
 How organised do you like to be?
 Do you thrive on organisation, or find that it
stifles your creativity?
 People oriented towards structure may
favour databases, or PIMs which offer
powerful data structuring.
 People oriented towards spontaneity and
personal creativity may prefer more visual
approaches – or to stick with paper!

72
Understand your style of
work: How do you work
best? - 2
 What kinds of computer software do you like,
feel at ease with, or want to master?
 Are you at ease with classification and with
rigour? Try database.
 Do you enjoy a numeric, quantitative, algebraic
approach? Try spreadsheet.
 Do you think visually? Try mind mapping or
concept maps.
 Are you brave enough to try novel
approaches? Try a specialist PIM program,
choosing one which suits you.

73
 Choose software to improve your
personal information
management
 One possibility is to use a ready made PIM
• We have already identified over 150 PIM/GIM
(group information manager) programs
 What if that is too restrictive, or you can't afford it?
• Another possibility is to "roll your own" personal
information management using office tools
• Word processing
• Spreadsheet
• Database
• Etc.
74
Some examples of the kind of programs used for personal and small-group
information management on different computer platforms
Platform ➨PC Proprietary Open Source Mac Proprietary Cloud (SaaS,
Software As A
Type of program ➪
Service)

Operating system, with Microsoft Mandrake or Apple OS/X Glide

connection to local area Windows similar Linux
and global networks distribution

Web browser Microsoft Firefox Apple Safari n/a

Internet Explorer

e-mail client with built in Microsoft Thunderbird Built-in n/a

basic PIM capability Outlook
Office productivity suite Microsoft Office OpenOffice.org; Microsoft Office for Google Apps;
KDE Mac; Apple iWork Zoho

Word processing Microsoft Word OpenOffice.org Microsoft Word; Google Docs

Doc iWork Pages
Spreadsheet Microsoft Excel OpenOffice.org Microsoft Excel; Google Docs
Calc iWork Numbers
Relational database Microsoft Access OpenOffice.org FileMaker Pro Qrimp
management program Base
(RDBMS)
Personal information InfoQube KDE Pim; OSAF Tinderbox Basecamp
Some significant PIM approaches –
examples only! find your own
personal preference!
 Microsoft Outlook  Mind mapping
• Appointments, contacts, • VisiMap
tasks, emails… • MindManager
 Microsoft Office  Group Information Managers
• See in particular, Word, Excel, • Lotus Notes
Access, Outlook, OneNote,
Visio, SharePoint, InfoPath,
 Specialist PIM applications
Groove • Chandler
 Web Services • Info Select
• Backpack • Tinderbox (Mac only)
• Remember The Milk • Ecco and EccoExt
• Google Calendar • InfoQube
• Plaxo  Semantic desktop – mainly
research prototypes
• Digg, Reddit, del.ici.ous
• Twine – semantic web • Gnowsis
 Concept maps • Haystack
• CMap

76
Important Note
 MostPIM and GIM tools are paid-for
software
• Few are free-to-download or open-source
 Many are available on a try-before-you-
buy basis
• Use this freedom
• Please don’t abuse it… “the labourer is worthy
of his hire”!

77
Standard PIM features
 Personal notes/journal
 Address books (contacts)
 Lists (including task, “to-do” lists)
 Significant calendar dates
• Appointments and meeting
• Birthdays
• Anniversaries
 Reminders
 Archives of email, instant messages, fax
communications, voicemail, etc.

78
Some advanced PIM features
 Example tool: InfoQube, IQ
• User-defined folders (IQ calls them fields) – so you build
your own classification and cross-link information
• IQ permits:
• Hierarchical classification – splitting things up into categories
(and even sub-categories)
• Multiple (network) assignment
• In IQ, one item can be classified by more than one field; this
means that you can classify things in multiple, overlapping ways;
the same thing can appear in more than one place. It also
supports wiki-style tagging.
•Auto-classification and auto-linking can be achieved on the
basis of rules
 Note implication: users only get the best from these tools as they
structure their data and also think about processes

79
 Situational Applications
 There exist applications builders which can be used by non-
technical users to build customised multi-user business
information systems
• Captive databases, available only locally: e.g. Microsoft
Access
• Relational databases deployed on the Web: e.g. Qrimp
 Such applications are increasingly “in the cloud”
• On Web servers
• Which may not be under the direct control or ownership of the
organisation which owns the information
 IBM has suggested a new name for this category of simple
applications builders: "situational applications builders“
• See (Cherbakov et al. 2007)
• See also (Gregory & Norbis 2009)

80
Do you need a situational
application?
 Firstlyaudit your personal and small-
group information needs, as above
 Then list the “big” business information
systems you use
 Identify any gaps: do you and your
colleagues / collaborators, in any context,
need to procure a new system or build
your own using a situational application
builder?

81
1m
A possible
N of the App
u
m
Corporate Web 2.0 Spa
transaction-
1000 b applications
oriented
e
applications
r

o
100
f
GIM: Group
u Information
s Situational Management
10 e Applications
r PIM: Personal
s Information
Management Text
1 Spreadsheets
Action – Now!
 You and I have only one life to live
 Sometimes we have to collaborate, to wait
while others get things done for us
 But mostly, our destinies are in our own hands
 Let’s stop procrastinating and act – now – to
improve our own information management and
personal productivity
 Audit your information management, then act
to improve it

83
Acting to improve your personal
information management
 Choose at least one software program which you will use over the
next few weeks in order to help you IMPROVE the ways in which
you Get Things Done and Keep Found Things Found
• Start to use it NOW
• Set a time limit on your experiment – say five or six weeks
• Do the necessary learning to get into the program
• Take a LOG of what you do with the program, how you plan its
use, how you learn more about it, what your experiences are –
good and bad
• A log is a list of things you have actually done – what they were and when
you did them.
• At the end, complete your log with an EVALUATION of how
effective your experiment was. What will you do in the future to
improve?
• Maybe share the log online? Join our gang?

84
Further help in improving your
personal information
management
 The main points of this presentation are
available in the form of a template
questionnaire, which you can fill in and
– optionally – share with others
• Helps you to get things done because you’ve
made a visible commitment
• Potentially helps in my research

85
Parenthesis: More about
classification - ontology
 So far, we’ve taken a fairly light or
informal approach to KFTF
 Classifying, tagging and associating
meaning with information may need to
be taken further…

86
 Parenthesis: Making it easier to
find things - Background
 We nearly all classify things – that is, we group them by name or
keyword (work, home, clubs and associations…)
 A simple organization of kinds of things is to list them
alphabetically. If we give a list a title which attempts to name or
describe the items in the list, we begin to establish a vocabulary. If
we make a list of football teams, each member of the list “is-a”
football team.
 Making items into lists, and deciding which list each member is a
part of, is a process called taxonomic classification or just
classification, and it is fundamental to science and to the
communication of meaning: we are ascribing and defining a
vocabulary, and grouping things by their classification or type
• See (Boardman 2004) for a fuller discussion, including the limitation
of hierarchical (tree) structures
• See (Golder & Huberman 2005) for a discussion of classification
and tagging

87
Making it easier to find
things – Applying this to your
information
 How do you group files into folders on your PC?
Can you, should you, improve this? How have
your classifications changed in the past, and what
changes do you anticipate?
 Do you find the inherent limitations of the standard
folder structure (which is strictly hierarchic, and is in
fact a taxonomic classification) troublesome?
• Do you need ways to store things in more than one place at a
time?
• Do you need to take this further as an ontology?

88
Archives – finding old things
 Have you previously used software and/or
platforms which you no longer have or wish to
retain?
 Have you already exported the data /
information to a current platform? Should you
now do so?
 Have you still got the use of the old software?
Have you a way to access the old data /
information?

89
 Relevance to your self-audit: Why is it
important to classify things?
 We need to store lists in a way in which we can find the lists and
their contents easily, name them, classify their contents, and relate
them
 Your personal information management may need to evolve in
these directions
 It is therefore wise to choose programs which permit you to
• Create your own lists and then to name them
• To classify them either by a keyword within a hierarchy of keywords or
by more than one keyword (like tagging in social networks)
• To search them
• To enable you to link one item to another
 Unfortunately, very few programs do all of these things!
• And the ones that do demand self-investment

90
Towards Personal Knowledge
Management
 What do your data mean?
 There is limited support in some PIMs for classification of
contents
• User-specified keyword classification of information
structured in accordance with user design
• Rule-based auto-classification, where the tool
automatically classifies items
• Tagging
 Semantic web approaches, such as semantic desktop, are
just beginning to appear
• Q: Why is this significant?
• A: Emerging shared ontologies (shared vocabularies!)
should be a significant change enabler in groups of knowledge
workers

91
Our initial research hypotheses (Why do
people choose not to use PIMs and GIMs?)
 Hypothesis 1
• The data-centred approach adopted by most PIMs is not necessarily well
adapted to the working methods adopted by knowledge workers. Establishing
what styles and functionalities appeal to (or repel) different types of users is not
yet well understood.
 Hypothesis 2
• Current PIMs tend to emphasise one particular information management
technique, to the exclusion of others. The absence of complementary
information management techniques is one of the factors which cause
knowledge workers to reject current PIMs.
 Why and how to choose between databases and spreadsheets?
 Hypothesis 3
• PIMs are not much used because PIMs either impose an ontology which does
not correspond to the user’s ontology, or do not permit that ontology to be
made explicit and/or shared. The incorporation of explicit knowledge
representation mechanisms which are tailored to their users’ (plural) needs will
make a PIM more useful: by beginning to turn it into a small-group knowledge
manager.
 Knowledge is about classification and association; let’s make that explicit!

92
Parenthesis: Radically rethinking
your personal information management:
Ontology
 An ontology defines a set of representational primitives which
model a domain of knowledge
 Ontologies extend taxonomy by applying a larger variety of
relation types than just “is-a”
• The representational primitives are typically classes (or sets),
attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations
among class members)
 An ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts
within a domain and the relationships between those
concepts; it can be used to reason about the objects within
that domain
 Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web,
software engineering and information architecture as a form of
knowledge representation about the world or some part of it

93
Parenthesis: Ontologies
generally describe
 Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects
 Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects
 Attributes: properties, features,
characteristics, or parameters that objects can
have and share
 Relations: ways that objects can be related to
one another
 Events: the changing of attributes or relations
• http://www.owlseek.com/whatis.html checked 26/03/2009

94
 Parenthesis: Ontology 101
 So what is your ontology?
 Start off with a hierarchical classification,
and see if that works well enough for you
 If you or a project of which you are a part really
needs a full ontology, consider using an
ontology editor
 Much interest centres around Stanford’s
Protégé open source ontology editor and
knowledge-base framework
• See http://protege.stanford.edu/

End of ontology parenthesis

95
Post-implementation audit
 We suggest that:
• You carry out an initial audit and then Get Started
 Later, after a suitable evaluation period (at least five or six
weeks), please revisit your original personal information
audit and evaluate the extent to which your personal and
small-group information management has improved
• Good experiences (and bad ones…)
• Areas for further improvement
• What help you needed, where did you get it, what further help
do you now need?
 Much later, you will want to re-evaluate your
success
• And very likely change some of the tools you use

96
Self-Audit: A Summary
 You should aim to Get Things Done
 You should aim to Keep Found Things Found
 Take into full consideration
• Personal work (and living, fun, e.g. music)
• Group work: work you do with others
 Decide whether and how to self-audit
• If you wish, you can complete the Word document that you’ll find
here
A-Form-You-Can-Complete-as-You-Audit-Your-Personal-Inform
 We hope you’ll want to talk to us about your
experiences, and thereby contribute to my research

97
(Allen 2003) Allen, D., 2003. Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity, penguin books.
(Alter 2002) Alter, S., 2002. Information Systems: Foundation of E-Business, 4/e 4 éd., Pearson Education.
(Boardman 2004) Boardman, R., 2004. Improving tool support for personal information management. London:
Imperial College: Dept. of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.
(Cherbakov et al. 2007) Cherbakov, L. et al., 2007. Changing the corporate IT development model: Tapping the power of
grassroots computing. IBM Systems Journal, 46(4), 743.
(Drucker 2000) Drucker, P.F., 2000. Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge. The knowledge
management yearbook 2000–2001.
(Golder & Huberman 2005) Golder, S. & Huberman, B.A., 2005. The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Arxiv
preprint cs/0508082.
(Gregory & Norbis 2008a) Gregory, M. & Norbis, M., 2008a. The business of personal knowledge. Dans 8th International
Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organisations. Cambridge University, United
Kingdom.
(Gregory & Norbis 2008b) Gregory, M. & Norbis, M., 2008b. Towards a Systematic Evaluation of Personal and Small
Group Information and Knowledge Management. Dans 5th International Conference on
Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications: CITSA 2008. Orlando,
FA.
(Gregory & Norbis 2009) Gregory, M. & Norbis, M., 2009. Evaluating Situational Applications Builders. Dans CITSA 2009:
The 6th International Conference on Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and
Applications. Orlando, FA.
(Jones 2007) Jones, W.P., 2007. Keeping found things found: The study and practice of personal information
management, Morgan Kaufmann Pub.
(Lurey & Raisinghani 2001) Lurey, J.S. & Raisinghani, M.S., 2001. An empirical study of best practices in virtual teams.
Information & Management, 38(8), 523–544.
(Paquette 2002) Paquette, G., 2002. Modélisation des connaissances et des compétences: un langage
graphique pour concevoir et apprendre, Puq.
(Strassmann 1999) Strassmann, P.A., 1999. Information Productivity, Strassmann, Inc.
(Toffler 1990) Toffler, A., 1990. Powershift: Knowledge, wealth, and violence at the edge of the 21st century,
Bantam.
Thanks for reading so far!
Now here’s a Request:
 If you wish to comment further on this presentation or
paper;
 Or if you complete the Personal Audit Challenge(!) to be
found at
A-Form-You-Can-Complete-as-You-Audit-Your-Personal-Information-Manag
;
 Contact me:
• Put your name on the list
• Or email mark.gregory@esc-rennes.fr
 Join Our Gang! We are a community of people aiming to
improve their information management
 Over to you…

99